Abundance: The Technology Is Ready. Are We?

There’s a type of optimistic tech book that tells you a better future is just around the corner, if only we’d use the tools we already have. Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson starts out feeling like one of those.

But then it gets a lot more uncomfortable.

Photo by Danist Soh on Unsplash

The basic argument is: we do have the technology. Solar and wind energy are cheaper than anyone predicted. AI is taking over large chunks of cognitive work. Medicine keeps improving.

So why doesn’t life feel dramatically better for most people?

Their answer is that we’re in our own way. Not because of bad intentions, but because of accumulated layers of well-meaning rules and institutions that (if combined) make it very hard to actually build things.

The housing chapter stuck with me

California is the main example here, and it’s a good one. Strong progressive values, serious social programs and some of the worst homelessness and housing costs in the country. The authors argue that those things are connected.

When you stack environmental review, community input, anti-discrimination requirements and a dozen other mandates onto a single housing project, costs explode and timelines stretch to years. Houston, with far fewer requirements, builds faster and cheaper and has much lower homelessness. The lesson isn’t that regulation is bad. It’s that when one project has to solve five problems at once, it often solves none of them well.

There’s one observation in the book that I keep thinking about: if a homeless shelter has an air filtration system matters a lot less if the alternative is a tent under a highway.

The research problem

The invention chapter introduces something called the “knowledge burden”. The idea that easy discoveries get made first, and everything after requires more effort, more equipment, more people. The first new element ever found was basically a high school experiment. Discovering tennessine took an international team and a particle accelerator.

And then there is the funding problem. Research grants have become very risk-averse. Scientists spend more and more time writing applications and less time actually doing research. The result is that exploratory work (the kind that produced the transistor or the internet) gets squeezed out in favour of safe projects that are easier to justify on paper.

What the book is really saying

By the end, this is as much a political argument as a technological one.

The authors want a politics (left-leaning, in their framing) that actually cares about getting things done, not just about the process of trying. The (implicit) critique is that a lot of progressive politics has drifted toward valuing consultation and review over actual outcomes.

I think that this critique is mostly right, though the book is very US-American. The specific examples (California’s permitting system, NIH funding, federal energy projects) are real, but if you’re outside the US you’ll need to do some translation.

The question I’m left with

Every rule the authors criticize exists for a reason. Environmental reviews caught real problems. Peer review in science exists because researchers got things wrong. None of it is arbitrary.

But systems pile up. Each added layer makes sense on its own. Together they can create something that’s more cautious and less effective than what it replaced.

The challenge isn’t to tear it all down. It’s to occasionally ask whether the sum of it is still serving the original goal or whether the process has quietly become the point.

Abundance is a good book for sitting with that question. It’ll probably irritate you at some point no matter what you believe. That’s usually worth paying attention to.